If you choose to share your life with an artist, as I do, the odds are good you are going to spend a fair amount of your leisure time popping into galleries, strolling through museums and scanning the cheese platter at art openings. Fortunately, I happen to like these spaces. I like them so much I even did my master’s in museum studies, so it works out.
Brunswick resident Heather D. Martin wants to know what’s on your mind; email her at heather@heatherdmartin.com.
I love art, and I love museums. I always have. When I was young and my parents let me choose where to have my birthday, it never even crossed my mind to head for an amusement park or some such thing. No. My choice was always a museum.
We lived in north central Massachusetts, rural farmland, but close enough to Worcester that the stone chapel inside the Worcester Art Museum was a frequent haunt, and close enough to Boston that the Museum of Fine Art saw me regularly. In fact, it was there I had my first near-religious experience. While walking through galleries, I turned a corner and there, at the end of a blank white hallway, taking up the entire wall facing me, was an English landscape by David Hockney. I stood transfixed. For a long time. I don’t remember anything else about that day. What I do recall, perfectly, are the bright purple rows of land, the oranges and blues. The reds. I was not only transfixed; I was transformed.
This is what art can do, and this is the role of the gallery or museum – to make these works available for us all to experience and enjoy.
Where I think we can do better, is in extending the invitation to everyone to be there.
Go to enough of these spaces, and you can’t help but notice a certain … homogeneous look to the gathering. There are a lot of tweed blazers and chunky silver necklaces in the room.
Maine is a state that prides itself on its history of lumber mills, seafarers and hard-working farmers – we have just launched a fantastic and innovative scholarship program for emerging blue-collar workers and tradespeople. Where are the carpenters, the plumbers, the lobstermen/women when the gallery opens, and why are we not doing more to make them feel welcome?
Another glaring element is in the ethnic diversity, or lack thereof, in the room.
I know, I know, we live in Maine. The overall population is not noted for its diversity and therefore it should not be surprising that a mini subset reflects that. I grant that there is truth in that – and I also think it is a bit of a cop-out.
Maine is changing. New cultures, new traditions, new foods are coming with the people making this place home. Simultaneously, there is a long overdue awareness of, and appreciation for, the culture, traditions and people that were here before colonization.
We are in the midst of perhaps the most interesting, vibrant and conscious-shaking conversations on self and place we have ever had – and art, the most primal means of self-expression dating to the very origins of civilization itself, will be at the core. It cannot help but be there. We must recognize the absolute necessity for everyone, absolutely everyone, be included and made welcome in the conversation. We are all vital.
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